Mushroom Networks brings its 'Broadband Bonding' technology to video surveillance

One of the age-old problems with building surveillance networks that leverage numerous remote or mobile cameras is how to deal with the inevitable problems presented by latency and lack of bandwidth. And while wireless mesh and other technologies have come a long way in helping the industry address many of these concerns, there remain significant limitations. However, San Diego-based Mushroom Networks has developed a new solution, the ThirdEye 4000i, which they believe will be a game-changer for remote video surveillance applications and pan-tilt-zoom cameras, in particular.

According to Cahit Akin, founder and CEO of Mushroom Networks, the company is primarily known for its “Broadband Bonding” technology which takes two or more Internet connections and merges them into a much faster and more reliable single IP connection.

“For example, let’s say you have four cellular modems – one from AT&T, two from Verizon and one more from Sprint or any other combination you want – our system will combine that into a fatter tunnel,” explains Akin. “It’s not only much faster because now you can get the total speed of the individual lines due to our technology but also the reliability gets a boost as well. Networks are, by nature, vulnerable to fluctuations, disconnects, performance dips and things like that and normally if you have one connection you’re at the mercy of those performance metrics. But when you intelligently merge these lines and manage them, you can work around those networking problems and shield that application from the issue at hand. Let’s say you’re doing webcasting, video conferencing or, in our specific case here, you’re monitoring a surveillance camera feed, if that one line has a problem then you have a problem, your video suffers and you may even get disconnected.”

This idea behind the ThirdEye 4000i was to take this bonding technology and optimize it for the specific purpose of installing PTZ and other cameras without the need for a wired Internet connection. Several times throughout the company’s history, Akin says they have come up with product ideas and brought them to market based predominantly on feedback they’ve received from their customers and the 4000i is a perfect example of this. Essentially, Akin says they discovered some of their public safety customers were using their Truffle product, which is a rack mountable server device designed for branch offices to aggregate wired Internet lines, to stream video from the field.

“What happened was, over the years, some of our clients started using external cellular modems converted to Ethernet and they plugged those into the Truffle and tried to use this device in a vehicle,” Akin says. “Once we talked with them - some of these customers are emergency responders, police departments, sheriff’s offices, etc. - we realized what they were trying to do is… send high-quality video reliably on the go.”

Since the Truffle was really too big for this type of application, Akins says their engineers began working on developing a device that was roughly half the size of a desktop phone, was portable and had a plate that could be removed to expose SIM card slots. “We built four modems into the box so you don’t need to have those USB dongles that you normally plug into your laptop to get an LTE connection,” adds Akin. “All the user has to do is pop in those 3G, 4G, and LTE SIM cards into those slots.”

In addition, the 4000i unit has been hardened for in-vehicle use, as the platform’s certifications include EN50155 class TX, which is a certification for trains as well as fanless operation with a wide temperature range and wide vibration tolerance. Akin says hardening the device was important so it could operate in the harsh environments its clients have to deal with day-in and day-out.

Because the 4000i is optimized for PTZ, Akin says that before the video feed is even sent out they use a “special coding” to ensure that any lost packet can be recovered before it is relayed on to the user. Of course, any kind latency would also be unacceptable for those at the controls of a PTZ camera so the company has built-in specific algorithms to deal with those types of concerns as well, according to Akin.  

Akins says part of Mushroom Networks’ go-to-market strategy for the 4000i going forward will be to partner with video surveillance hardware and/or software vendors as part of an effort to raise awareness about its capabilities across the industry.

“We primarily like to go-to-market through value-added resellers where basically we talk about integration with a company that pulls in the PTZ cameras, our system, the software for managing the PTZ cameras and whatever other components are required for the project and we basically reach the end-user through that partner,” Akin says. “We’ve done some similar things in our other product lines where the combination makes sense.”

The ThirdEye 4000i will be available for purchase during the third quarter of 2016.